EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant.

Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale.

2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.)

> Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.

I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.

EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".

You are quite correct—I haven't yet figured out how to convey the interesting product/technical challenges we're working on in a mass way: especially not well enough to overcome must developers instinctual reaction to "publishing."

If you have a minute, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could better communicate through our listings: http://www.cafe.com/careers

If you want to attract exceptional engineers then by gosh, you might just have to pay exceptional salaries.

At the end of the day, it's a business relationship and an intelligent engineer is quite justified in capturing some of the value that he or she generates.

And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Here's what I'm getting at- sell people on the vision and what their specific role in it would be. What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world? As a startup, you've got the vision thing, or at least you damn well better, and it's your advantage. :-)

> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?

> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.

> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?

Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:

Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.

I like the reworked description too. Definitely implies some interesting work to be done.

In Silicon Valley, the talent pool is very picked over. I suggest to anyone in SV to look outside the immediate area. Post ads in Kansas or Michigan. Some place where getting paid a NYC salary seems great.

You have to get creative.

Even if there was a dramatic increase in engineers - there is no guarantee that they would be interested in cafe.com.

I did look at your job postings and I do have some suggestions:

1. List your tech stack - not as a requirement but just to let applicants know what they are signing up for. 2. List your tech stack for SEO purposes- I can't think of any google search that would put the cafe.com jobs high on the list. 3. What are you doing to market the job - be aggressive with linkedin, github, stackoverflow. Every single week I get interview requests by all three channels.

If you are not aggressively recruiting people who are not actively looking then you are missing the boat.

The last time I actively looked for a job was a decade ago. Most job connections come to me via friend/network/etc.

We avoided listing our tech stack because people frequently read it as a requirement, but I think you're right. Will add it soon.

We aggressively recruit on LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and AngelList, but the majority of our qualified applicants have actually come through my network and Hacker News. I'm trying to expand this though, particularly because I want to avoid building a mirror image engineering team (young, white, males in their 20s).

Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business?

After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work to suppress our wages -- and on the other side, us, I actually want to see them lose and get hurt after all the terrible things they did to us.

I'm not a VC or founder. I'm a developer just like you, trying to deliver cool products—but doing so requires more developers.

If my company was trying to suppress wages, or refused to pay above market, then I'd agree with you that we have no right to ask for more talent. But we're perfectly willing to pay for talent—we just can't find any.

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of senior developers on the market was less than 10% of the number of open positions.

BUT: I guarantee you that there is in fact a wage and benefits package you can offer that would get you more good applicants. Maybe it's more money (sure, "above market" is nice, but I'm not going to leave a job for $5K more than my "market" rate -- but for $50K more, well, let's talk). Maybe it's perks and benefits (the Google package, for instance).

Whatever it is, there is absolutely money you can spend that would end up getting you noticeably more applicants one way or the other. That the company doesn't WANT to spend that money is exactly what bothers people.

And yes, yes, it's all well and good to say that developers are paid and treated well -- they are -- but if their talent and skill is really that rare and that in-demand, maybe they should be paid and treated even better.

How would we communicate said information in a way that doesn't actively distort the hiring process? When was the last time you saw a job ad with salary listed?

That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to be making 150k+. Which if that is what you are offering, great. But if it's not then you can find the talent you are looking for, you just can't afford it.

As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate).

> (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor?

I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up to $150k+.

Banks will pay at least 2x more and large tech companies closer to that than what you are offering.

Note I'm not talking about truly great developers, merely good senior ones.

For reference, $150k is right on target according to AngelList data: https://angel.co/salaries

Most companies fail, making their stock options worthless. And even the few companies that succeed usually hit bumps in the road that dilute the stock options or put their value underwater.

So if you have a reason to think your idea of "substantial equity" is much more likely than average to ever be worth anything at all, you should make that fact a key part of your pitch. (Or if you're indifferent between equity and salary, offer more salary and less equity.)

Unless your company ends up being the next Google or Facebook (which is a statistically unlikely outcome for any startup), your "substantial equity" may never be worth any significant amount of money. Living in NYC is expensive, and you can't pay your rent with stock options.

I only have anecdotal data, I don't think many people have more, but I am very sure a decent senior dev can get way more than what you are offering.

I think there is more to a job than just the salary, but at least be open about the fact that there are open positions doing similar work in the same city offering significantly more.

What about those you haven't?

What do you think is the highest value of deploying monetary and other resources to make that happen, given that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter?

A lot of the phrases in vogue right now seem to indicate companies that want employees that work 80 hour weeks and pay entry level salaries. Have you tried "competitive compensation" or some other non-numerical indicator that you guys pay well or phrases that indicate you guys have a professional vs. passionate culture?

Then again, I wrote them. So you can see for yourself: http://www.cafe.com/careers

Just looked at your "Lead Engineer" listing. It says: "We offer a great startup work environment with free beer, snacks, and friendly teammates." That sounds more like a typical startup that expects people to work there for the fun experience than a workplace that wants to attract highly-paid professionals.

And the offer of free beer makes it sound like a frat party. Maybe that's a turn-off to women who don't want to work in a place full of drunken guys. Maybe it's a turn-off to guys who want to have a life outside of work. Skip the free beer and make sure your employees have enough free time after work to get a beer outside if they want to.

I once got messaged on LinkedIn by a Bloomberg/banking guy looking for me to contract with them in New York at a rate of $144,000/year, and I'm comparatively junior. A properly senior developer, someone with something like 7-10 years of experience in industry, should definitely be making a bunch more than some guy offers me off-the-cuff when trying to recruit on LinkedIn -- especially in an expensive area like NYC!

We have successfully hired people from Bloomberg and finance (including competitive compensation).

One thing to keep in mind is that contracting is very different from full time. $150k is low for senior contractors but normal for senior developers (annualized, I expect senior developer consultants to be making more than $200k if they're based in NYC).

Of course, your firm can also do its own part to fix the problem directly: hire more junior candidates and train them up. Yes, I realize this is quite difficult for your situation, but consider that if few to no companies train junior developers into senior ones, that explains why there are so few senior developers on the market.

And then there's the housing shortages around NYC and SF that make land rent eat up most salary rises -- that's worth an entire post in itself.

More practically, I wouldn't feel right hiring junior developers when I don't think we'd be giving them the best training given our current staffing levels and product needs. Since we already have too few senior devs, I'm not sure I could justifiably ask the team to take on the additional burden of mentoring junior developers (though I do hope we can start a robust training program once the dev team is a bit larger).

Training is a benefit - not a cost.

Don't limit yourself to local candidates. Especially somewhere like NYC.

You, likely, couldn't offer me enough money to move/live there...especially for an early stage startup.

For many roles we're very open to hiring remote developers. Even that is rather challenging. (Though for lead roles, we do ask that you be based in NYC because it involves a lot of brainstorming with writers/analysts.)

While I don't doubt that you see a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for your positions, one of the harsh realities of this market is that it's hard to attract "great" people, even if you're at or above market in terms of compensation. There just aren't enough "great" people to go around, so other factors, such as technical challenges and business viability, are often taken into consideration by quality candidates. Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you.

Early-stage startups like yours would be wise to consider optimizing their businesses and technology architectures around this fact. Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees.

A lot of companies will insist this isn't viable ("We needed 15 unicorns yesterday because we're building the world's most advanced analytics platform for selfies!") but most of them aren't being honest with themselves about their real needs. They're intent on building technology for the business they think they'll have and don't want to admit that they don't know how to develop employees.

I don't think immigration is a panacea (in fact, my primary point in this thread has just been to rebuke the argument that salaries aren't rising so therefore there isn't a tech shortage). That being said, we do have some overseas contractors who I'd love to bring in-house if the immigration system didn't make doing so incredibly byzantine and challenging.

> Chances are there are other startups competing for the same talent that seem to be working on more challenging problems and have better prospects than you.

I do think this is truthfully a big part of the challenges. Despite the fact that our CEO has a great track record (two successful exits, last one for $545M+) and that we're actually building some cool technology (using data & technology to make it easy for writers to understand how their content flows across the web and to adapt their writing accordingly) many are turned off by the fact that we're working in "publishing."

Unfortunately, at this point it seems almost impossible to hire good developers unless you're Google—even if you have a viable business model and interesting/new technology (microservices, graph analytics, etc.).

> Unless you can pay stupid guap or are working on something really, really objectively interesting, one of the best and most underutilized techniques for finding great employees is to hire decent folks with potential and develop them into great employees.

We're very big on hiring based on potential, but there is a certain baseline. Particularly because our engineering team is small as it is, bringing on junior devs would be somewhat unfair to our existing developers—increasing their workload.